Wednesday, we have finally presented Augabis to the other students from Master E-Services.

As we promised, here are the poster and the video we have made to present our project!

The video

Below is the video we have made. English subtitles are available if you don’t speak French 😉

We would like to thank Nathalie Vaurette, our Video teacher, for her advises, Armand Bour, a friend of ours who accepted to play in our video (check out his and his partner’s project, Crispy Magic!), and LILLIAD Learning Center staff who have accepted that we use their Salle Y, a space designed to make new teaching methods emerge.

The poster

Aren’t you tired by all these Post-it?

And now?

Augabis’ source code will be opened very soon (probably after Valentine’s Day), just after having tweaked some details to make it possible for a future community to contribute to source code.

In the meantime, I would like to thank very much:

Yucheng, who has joined me on this project and has made a really nice work

Cédric Houbart, who oversaw our project

Jean-Claude Tarby, lecturer at the University Lille 1, who has accepted that we work on Augabis during Platine Projects

The students from ESAAT, who advised us for the graphic identity, and Solène for the great logo

Marius Bilasco, the Master E-Services training manager who has a little advertised about Augabis on Twitter

Platine projects’ purpose is not just to make an application et voilà: another facet of the discipline is to learn to communicate about it (that’s why we have to create a blog). In this purpose we have to make a video and a poster to present our project. The latter are ready, but will not be revealed for now. 😛

Our presentation of Augabis is set on 8th February, so we have decided to stop its development for now, in order to preserve its stability. After this date, Augabis’ source code will be opened and its development will start again!

Today, Solène, a student of ESAAT who visited us in November, has created a brand new logo for Augabis. After having chosen a font (Roboto from Google), she has made a really nice draw of what will from now be our logo:

This logo is much rounder than the first: it follows the idea to make a less aggressive design we started to embrace in November. The horizontal lines represent the tasks you write in Augabis, represented by the circle which encompasses them.

We would like to thank Solène $10^{10^{10}}$ (yep, a Googolplex) times for her really precious help! Feel free to tell us what you think about it 🙂

In consequence of this, and considering the deadline is for the end of this month, we have managed to make a really minimalist but functional application in which we’ll only be able to (what’s italic is done):

As we are both completely newbies at Symfony, we are a little slower than we could, but we are beginning to get used to this very powerful framework. So to make the development as quicker as possible, we have separated our works: while Yucheng is working on displaying a user’s notes (as described in this post), I’m finishing to implement the mechanism of subscription and identification.

Last week we have changed several design issues, which could enable our web app to be more and comfortable to use.

This week’s topic is the assignment of the works. It means that we separated different parts of development, and each of us chose certain part to carry on. Our major developments are list of the notes, the details of the notes, login/signout session and the toolbar at the top of the page.

Unfortunately, we are not that familiar with the framework symfony. It pretty cost time to master the symfony, especially the configuration of the environment. Moreover, the course has not yet discussed the usage of “Model”, so we have no concrete idea of how to implement it yet. Therefore, the parts mentioned above are programmed without the implementation of the database.

Last but not least, we have reviewed the points with the coach (link) since last meeting. Cédric thought that it’s really convinient to use the framework in order to avoid duplicated works and focus on the logic of the application. He has also given us many valuable suggestions about the management of the project which enlighten our insights.

So that’s all for this week. Thanks for your reading. See you next week :).

Today, we have finally started the development of Augabis! As the time begins to lack a little, we have decided to use the famous framework Symfony 3, since we have currently some courses about it, and since it seems to fit perfectly with the project.

Our Platine professor has organised too a meeting with students at ESAAT (École Supérieure Arts Appliqués et Textile), in order to give us the opportunity to get tips about the design of the mocks-up presented by Yucheng last week. They gave us many very useful advises to improve both our general design and our graphical identity:

One of the most important is the main colour: red is a very bad idea for an application for managing ToDos, as this is a stressing colour. A more relaxing colour as blue or green is really important. If you come often on this site through the home page, you may have noticed the background of Augabis’ logo has switched to blue-green. This should be the new main colour of the Web application, instead of the previous red. The logo will also be adapted in consequence in a few time.

On the main list, a note should not exceed about 50 to 80 characters in width and 2 or 3 lines in height. If a note is too long, we have to cut it.

The list layout we proposed will finally not be implemented, as it does not allow to meet with the previous observation.

The logo should not display at the same time the check box and the title Augabis, because this gives twice the same information. So, we have decided to display only the check box 🙂

We would like to thank the students at ESAAT for their really interesting hints on our design!

Unfortunately, since last week I was not able to work with my partner, then we have decided to work separately and integrate our works together after reaching an agreement. My partner is responsible for making this set of figures in the following section by using Pencil.

Figure 1 The main page

Figure 2 The main page in another layout

As you can see here, the main page consists of a side bar on the left-hand side and the notes on the right-hand side, where we provide the users to apply many different layouts. To make things simple and to reach ergonomics’ goal, we’ve fixed the bar on top of the page. Once the users move their mouse to “Hi Jérôme”, a menu will spontaneously appear (see Figure 1), which enable them easily check their personal profiles and customize the settings. The users also can click the “List1, List2, List3” on the left-hand side to change the list of the presented notes, and meanwhile, the right-hand side will be correspondingly changed. If you forget where the note is, you can click the search bar and type any keywords that you remember no matter what the title, the contents or the tags are.

Figure 3 Details of the notes.

Clicking on a note will allow the user to review its concrete details, especially its content, tags, sub-notes and reminders. Each part of them can be adjusted by the user as they want.

Figure 4 the example of reminder

The login/signup is a popup window on the web page to improve the user’s experience by no need to leaving the page. The login window requires the username or email address and the password. The “forget password?” button aims to help user restore the password in case of forgetting. The signup window asks users to type in all the necessary information for sign up process, such as nickname, email address and password. Moreover, we further create a responsive design especially for the mobile users.

As above mentioned, this is our graphical interface. This interface will be consistently improved if we figure out a better solution.

As for all projects, before starting the development of Augabis, it is really important that we know what we’re talking about. That’s why today, we have discussed how we will develop the project, and, more precisely, we have created a first version of the Unified Model Language (UML) sheet representing the database.

An UML diagram representing the database (v1)

As you can see, each user will be able to classify their notes in folders (s)he can create, and each note can have different tags and one or several reminders. The choice of being able to add several reminders to a note comes from a personal experience: sometimes, you want to do be reminded you have to do something, but you know you’ll not have the time to finish it because you have other things to do. So you work on it, and then, if you think about it, you create a new reminder. But why not creating several reminders at once? That’s what you’ll be able to do in Augabis 🙂

Each reminder can be made by date and time or by place. This will especially be useful on a smartphone application, but could be implemented on the website too, by using JavaScript’s Location and Notification APIs (don’t worry about that, it will be entirely configurable ;)).

Each note can be associated to another note, so that you can create a real ToDo-list for one theme, and each note (and subnote) has a progression.

Next week, we will create some mock-ups in order to make a better idea of what it could look like.

Although there is no silver bullet, we could still improve our work in a less quick but more powerful way. That’s why we have a coach, an alumnus of our discipline who have been working for years.

This week we met our coach Cédric Houbart at Akedo, an amusement arcade in Lille. In fact, it is a very nice place to play and it has a big status of Link who is the character of the Legend of Zelda…

Back to the topic, we discussed about the project: what we are going to do, how we plan the development, which languages and which frameworks we are going to use. Cédric has expected a meet for every two weeks until the delivery to check the progress and give us professional suggestions.

Anyway, we have made sure all things in the project is clear. The next step will be start programming!